The next front in the chip battle between the US and China
NASA chose the technology to help future spacecraft land on uncharted planets. Meta uses artificial intelligence technology. Chinese engineers have turned to encrypting data.
And it could be the next front in the semiconductor trade war between the United States and China.
The technology is RISC-V, pronounced ‘risk five’. It evolved from a university computer lab in California to a base for countless chips that handle computer jobs. RISC-V essentially provides a kind of common language for designing processors found in devices such as smartphones, disk drives, Wi-Fi routers, and tablets.
RISC-V has sparked a new debate in Washington in recent months about how far the United States can or should go as it steadily expands restrictions on the export of technology to China that could advance the military. That’s because RISC-V, which can be downloaded for free from the Internet, has become a central tool for Chinese companies and government agencies hoping to match American prowess in semiconductor design.
Last month, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party – in an effort led by Representative Mike Gallagher, Republican of Wisconsin – recommended that a multi-agency government committee is investigating the potential risks of RISC-V. Congressional staffers have met with members of the Biden administration about the technology, and lawmakers and their aides have discussed expanding restrictions to prevent U.S. citizens from helping China on RISC-V, according to congressional staffers.
The Chinese Communist Party “is already seeking to use RISC-V’s design architecture to undermine our export controls,” Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, the top Democrat on the House committee, said in a statement. He added that participants in RISC-V should focus on advancing the technology and “not on the geopolitical interests of the Chinese Communist Party.”
Arm Holdings, a British company that sells competing chip technology, has also lobbied officials to consider restrictions on RISC-V, three people with knowledge of the situation said. Biden administration officials are concerned about China’s use of RISC-V but are wary of potential complications in regulating the technology, according to a person familiar with the discussions. The Commerce Department and National Security Council declined to comment.
The debate over RISC-V is complicated because the technology is based on open source software, the free programs like Linux that allow any developer to view and modify the original code used to create them. Such programs have pushed multiple competitors to innovate and reduce the market power of a single supplier.
But RISC-V is not code that you can use to create something directly. It is a series of basic computer instructions that determine what calculations a chip can perform. Engineers can download these instructions and integrate them into the much more complex task of creating design blueprints for parts of a semiconductor. Many companies sell RISC-V chip designs, and some universities and other institutions distribute them for free.
As with Linux – but not with technologies from companies like Arm and Intel – engineers around the world can make suggestions to improve the underlying instructions. That process is overseen by RISC-V International, a nonprofit organization with more than 4,000 members – including the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese companies such as Huawei and Alibaba, as well as Google and Qualcomm – in 70 countries.
The group changed its formation from the United States to Switzerland in 2020 to calm “concerns about political disruption” and control by a single country. The leaders said their model mirrored that of other international groups that master standard technologies such as Ethernet and Wi-Fi.
“Open standards have been around for a hundred years,” said Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International, in an interview. “This is no different.”
Open source technologies are generally allowed exceptions to U.S. export controls. Any change in that treatment “is certain to raise thorny legal issues and important public policy concerns,” said Daniel Pickard, a lawyer specializing in trade and national security at Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney.
U.S. regulations restrict Arm and RISC-V companies from exporting chip designs to China based on certain performance limits. But trying to limit the underlying instructions is like trying to control words or letters, Silicon Valley executives said.
“It’s absolutely foolish,” said Dave Ditzel, the chief technology officer of Esperanto Technologies, a chip startup that uses RISC-V. “It’s like saying, ‘The Chinese can read a book about nuclear weapons written in English, so let’s solve the problem by banning the English alphabet.’”
As RISC-V helps Chinese companies, including Huawei, design more semiconductors around the world, some U.S. officials have raised concerns that Beijing could use Chinese foundries to insert cyber vulnerabilities in chips that could be used to cripple America’s power grids and other critical infrastructure.
RISC-V proponents counter that technologies with inner details that can be openly studied are much more secure. Any new restrictions, RISC-V backers said, would weaken U.S. influence over the technology while doing little to stop China because the instruction set is already widespread.
The original inspiration for RISC-V was to save money. Starting in 2010, a professor and two graduate students began developing a new instruction set based on the technology of David Patterson, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who had helped invent Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC). The goal was to help study the inner workings of computers without having to pay Arm, which charges royalties for each chip using its technology.
“I just wanted to learn how to build computers,” says Yunsup Lee, one of the graduate students, who now works at SiFive, a start-up that sells RISC-V designs. Then the goal evolved “to benefit everyone in the world,” he said.
The RISC-V variant quickly attracted the interest of engineers. Having a standard set of instructions allows software programs to work on all chips that use them.
In China, engineers and officials were also quick to recognize the potential, viewing open source technology as a way to become self-sufficient and counter risks such as embargoes and supply disruptions, says Ni Guangnan, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, wrote in an article about RISC-V in June.
In 2019, Mr. Patterson, who now works at Google, helped establish a RISC-V lab in Shenzhen, China, which was supported by an institute previously founded by Berkeley and Tsinghua University in China. Representative Gallagher, in a video His commission, released in November, expressed concern about the professor’s work and the institute’s cooperation with organizations linked to Chinese military and intelligence activities.
Mr. Patterson declined to comment through a Google spokeswoman.
A UC Berkeley spokesperson said the university’s work with the institute was basic research that was unrestricted, and that the university was responding to requests for information from Congress.
More than 100 “major” Chinese companies are designing chips with RISC-V today, as are at least 100 new startups, said Handel Jones, an analyst at International Business Strategies. Many of the applications are in fairly mundane consumer products, but engineers believe the technology will eventually take over some of the most demanding tasks.
Chinese space scientists have suggested using RISC-V to develop powerful space computers. Other Chinese companies and institutions are aiming to string together RISC-V processors to handle larger tasks in data centers, including AI applications.
At a RISC-V conference in Silicon Valley in November, T-Head, Alibaba’s semiconductor subsidiary, discussed RISC-V designs that Sophgo, another Chinese company, used in a chip powering a large server deployed at the Shandong University in China. It’s the first time RISC-V technology has run a cloud-style computing service, the companies said.
“We just took a small step, but we put RISC-V at the starting line,” David Chen, ecosystem director at Alibaba, said at the event.